


towards the dreams you left so very far behind

by switchtozier



Category: IT, IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King, IT Chapter Two - Fandom
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Yearning, mom trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:54:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22128280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/switchtozier/pseuds/switchtozier
Summary: the happenings of one eddie kaspbrak’s life.(started as a self indulgent character study about the 27 years but i might write more oops—)
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier (Implied)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 11





	towards the dreams you left so very far behind

The first time Edward Kaspbrak leaves home, he is elated. 

He spreads his wings and flies away, (skyline pigeon, fly); not too far, of course. Not too far from the nest, far from home, but he’s free. He doesn’t live with his mother (full time) anymore and he can do what he wants (when he lets himself). It tastes so sweet, like a cup of fruit soaked in golden syrup. 

And then he goes back. 

He really has no excuse not to; uMaine is a thirty minute drive from Derry, and that’s being generous. He isn’t kicked off campus during breaks in the semester, but it sort of goes without saying that he’s expected to go home. So he goes home, whatever that looks like. And the freedom drifts away, melts away like cotton candy in a stream; Eddie is right back where he started, right back at the mouth of the river, and he is drowning in the ocean it becomes. He is drowning in his mother’s tears, elated and sorrowful, “I’m so happy you’re here” and “I never want you to leave again”. It’s all so much, all Eddie can do is shut down. 

He starts to forget how to be brave. It had been fading for a while, now, fading away like the memories of a red haired girl and a boy who could never quite get the words out, and when he passes the “Welcome to Derry” sign for the second time, it’s so far away he doesn’t even think to miss it. There is no spitfire girl, no stuttering but sure-jawed boy; no gentle smile paired with bright and knowing eyes, no boy with a pastel kippah; no haystacks and no chucks. There is nothing of who he was and who he’s left behind (or did they leave him behind?), nothing left of what he’s done. Nothing left of who he had become, that summer in the sewers, bolstered by his friends. 

Some friends they must have been if Eddie couldn’t even remember them, right? 

And so Eddie became afraid, again. He had mother dearest breathing down his neck even when he was in Orono, when he was where he was supposed to be safe, and he went back to Derry whenever she could tighten her grip around his soul tight enough that he was wrenched there as if by God. It felt like he had never left at all.

Sometimes, he hears a voice in his dreams — “Follow me, Eds.” “Let’s go west, together.” — but it’s a voice he doesn’t entirely recognise. It’s familiar; it’s love hidden behind insults, it’s big glasses and curly hair, it’s... Eddie doesn’t know what it is, exactly. He wants to listen, he wants to, but he can’t. He can’t leave his mama for a voice he doesn’t even know. 

Maybe she was right about him, all this time. Maybe she had always known there was something inside him that couldn’t be explained, and that’s why she tried to smother him. Maybe she thought if she drowned him it would never come to pass. There must be something wrong with him after all, he decides. There must be something evil living under his skin that makes him this way, makes him yearn and long and ache for something — someone — that doesn’t even exist, anything out there where he doesn’t belong. 

He was born in Derry, and it felt like he’d die in Derry, no matter what he did. He’d die and he’d do it sick and alone, just like his mother always said he would, because mother knows best, doesn’t she? Mother always knows best, she only wants the best for you, Eddie-Bear. It’s easy to forget when it feels like your brain is constantly being scrubbed raw by steel wool. 

The second time Edward Kaspbrak leaves home, he doesn’t even know why he bothers. The lustre of Orono had long since worn off; it did nothing to stave his mother from her daily (sometimes two or even three times a day) calls, her demanding of visits at least every other weekend, her words seeping into every corner of his brain. It’s only a matter of time until you flunk out, Eddie-Bear; you had never been very smart, missing so much school due to your illnesses. Don’t worry; mommy will be there to catch you when you fall, and she’ll never let you go again. It’s a sickening feeling to know that everything you do is inevitably worthless; you go through the motions, as one often does, but everyone knows what will happen in the end. Eddie figures this must be what it’s like to be a character in syndicated television, living life forever caught in a cycle of reruns. He hates it — he would hate it if he could. He would hate it if he knew anything else. 

He yearned. 

He yearned so much it felt like his tongue would fall out. It pushed up through his chest and throat like an asthma attack in reverse; instead of being empty and desperately trying to suck in air, he was too full. Always too full of longing and such a desperate, bone-deep ache he had no name for. It filled his brain with cotton during the day and pushed him to grip his fingernails into his forearms ‘till they bled at night, when there was nothing to distract him from the deep cavern of emptiness inside him. He spent many nights over the summer feeling as if he needed to go somewhere and never quite figured out why. He never quite figured out why his fingers itched to open his window, waiting for someone, why he wished he still had his old cassette player. He had no tapes worth keeping, didn’t he? Only the tapes he’d left under his bed, that his mother had somehow missed during her many a deep clean of his room, the ones he couldn’t remember getting. Titled things like “4 spaghetti” and a crude drawing of a heart. His player hadn’t been lucky enough to be spared — you’ll get brain rot from this kind of music, Eddie-Bear, listen to classical records on the gramophone downstairs with me, instead — so they were all useless. 

uMaine had once been his safe haven. It had become his prison. 

When he decides to transfer to NYU on a whim, he feels the most like himself than he has in years. There is no calculation behind it; no meticulous planning, no forethought. Just seeing a student during Christmas break, wearing an UCLA sweater, visiting family — and that voice: “Even if you don’t follow me, don’t stay here, Eds. It’ll kill you.” He knows now that he has to listen, or the leash wrapped around his throat will only tighten until it snaps his neck. 

NYU School of Business, class of 1998. His mother had cried when he told her, starting with broken whimpers choking out of her fat cheeks, slowly keening into sobs as Eddie stood resolute. He was 20 years old, he was a full fledged adult; but standing in front of his mother, saying, “Mommy, please don’t cry”, he had never felt more like a child. But he had pushed her anyways, pushed himself, and the next fall he was flying to New York City instead of Orono. Finally, he was too far away; long distance calls were expensive during the week and thus only happened once (once!) every Saturday, and weekend visits were right out. He feels so beautifully, deliciously free, he gets drunk on it. Makes some... questionable decisions, thanks to that voice in his head, the same voice that tells him to “follow me, go west.” 

Eddie sometimes wonders what could be waiting for him across the country, but the thought always slips through his fingers before it can get too far away from him; an ice cube pinched too hard between loose fingers, curly hair and loud laughter popping out of his minds eye before it gets too comfortable. It slips away too quickly for him to miss it, and he lives. He becomes his own person, in a way; the summers are brutal and the winter breaks are too long, but in New York he slowly becomes himself again, in a way he hadn’t been since yelling about gazebos and bullshit. Whatever that meant. 

And then he meets Myra. 

They’re in the same ECON 4000 class. She’s not a business major, needs the class to fulfil credit requirements, but she sits next to him on the very first day and chases off anyone else who tries to. They only start talking after Eddie asks her for notes one day, having missed the class because he was sick. 

She’s sweet, he tells himself. Tells himself that her insistence on visiting him in his dorm, her insistence on making sure he’s okay and hasn’t gotten sick again is just because she cares. She cares and she’s sweet, that’s why she’s always ringing his dorm asking how he is or to be let in. 

She makes him feel... something. He figures it must be love, because it’s very similar to how his mother makes him feel, and he loves her dearly. The connection makes sense in his head, and they start dating before midterms. She doesn’t even find out about his tattoos and piercings until the year is nearly over; she makes him take his piercings out to let them grow over and won’t look at him with his shirt off. He takes to wearing sweaters after the first time a sleeve of a t-shirt rides up to show the ink on his bicep, and she makes an over exaggerated gagging noise. Eddie remembers being disgruntled by it. It was nothing lewd, just a delicately rendered black-capped chickadee. He had heard another voice in the back of his head when he’d thought of that one — “kookee, kookee, lend me your bones” — but he hadn’t dwelled on it. He suddenly felt very defensive of the design; there was nothing wrong with it, Myra. 

Are you talking back to me, Eddie? I never said there was something wrong with it. You’re putting words in my mouth. Stop being mean to me. 

Sorry, sweetheart. I didn’t mean it. 

His mother loves her, and instead of stopping to think about what that might mean, he lets himself think it’s a good sign. Something his mother won’t fight him on, something he can just be allowed to have. 

He graduates, looks for jobs in the city. He visits his mother less; she seems satisfied with Myra’s care. He gets a steady job as a risk analyst at a semi-large firm (not too small, so there is room to move up the corporate ladder, but not too big; his company will never be a target) and proposes to Myra after three years of dating. They get married in the fall and it is, all around, a beautiful affair. Except for the fact that Eddie would have much rather gotten married in the summer or not married at all; but he was quickly falling back into complacency, back into what he knew. He got to choose between safety and freedom, and he chose safety because it was easy, because suddenly being in a relationship and graduating and having a job and an apartment was scary, and Myra was familiar and his mother liked her. It made things easy, to let her control it. 

Sixteen years went by so fast, after that. They had found a routine and went into it headfirst, and Eddie could feel himself sinking; sinking down deep into himself, sinking away from that voice that had always told him to follow. He had no reason to go anywhere; he had a life in New York, a job and a wife and a brownstone apartment. They were going to start trying for a baby soon, looking for a house with three bedrooms (Myra had already decided she wanted both a boy and a girl, and she had said so to Eddie very plainly, as if he had any control over the matter). 

They had never had sex before then, and trying for a baby never worked. After about a year or two they stopped trying altogether. They stopped having sex at all at around the 11th year of their marriage, both of them silently tired of faking orgasms. There was no point, not anymore. And Eddie was just fine with that, thank you very much; he wasn’t a very sexual person, that was all. His wife could never blame his lack of sexual performance on infidelity; the lack of interest on his face as his eyes raked over other women was obvious even to her. 

What was not so obvious was the upturned brows he would wear when another man, particularly taller and broader than him, would rest a big hand on his shoulder, the other raking through barely combed curly hair; how he’d clear his throat when a gangly intern would adjust thick, goofy looking glasses and shoot him a grin. How his palms felt sweaty and his mouth felt dry when Netflix autoplayed some random comedian’s special; he wasn’t even funny, his jokes obviously not his own, but something about him made Eddie’s heart flutter. “Follow me, Eds.” 

It all gave him a headache. So he opted to ignore it, instead; he chooses to ignore his coworker with the big long-fingered hands, snubs the intern who insists on shooting him finger guns at any opportunity, and absolutely blocks any mention of a “Trashmouth” on his Netflix. He has enough to worry about, like the odds of the stocks his client has invested going down too sharply, like the risk of his company engaging in a hostile takeover, like whether or not Myra is going to chastise him for how often he pees today. Does he have bladder cancer? You should go to the doctor, Eddie-Bear, you know how sensitive you are to sickness. There are more important things to worry about than the dark gaze of another man making something hot coil in his gut like Myra never could. He focuses on his job and keeping his wife happy and funding his need for different pills and medications of all different colours, popping them like candy. 

Then he gets the call and gets into a car accident, and it’s all down-hill from there.

**Author's Note:**

> yes the constantly changing perspective is on purpose — Form Equals Content baby !!! what the content is, of course, is up to u, dear reader ;)


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